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Thoreau championed the individual against the herd. 'If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. ' He teaches that truth is personal and that we must have the courage to live our own truth, even if it makes us outcasts. Conformity, to Thoreau, was a form of desperation.
"Some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word! Pythagoras says, truly enough, "A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God"; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature."
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849))
"It takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear."
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849))
"A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view."
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849))
"It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals."
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849))
"Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. "Natural History of Massachusetts". The Dial (July 1842) p. 39"
"What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but, as I love literature, and, to some extent, the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. p. 494"
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle (1863))
"Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction. Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 264"
"To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. p. 490"
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle (1863))
"They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head."
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience (1849))
"The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it."
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849))
"With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan, — mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards, — because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth, — because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end. p. 493"
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle (1863))
"The Vedas contain a sensible account of God." "The veneration in which the Vedas are held is itself a remarkable feat. Their code embraced the whole moral life of the Hindus and in such a case there is no other truth than sincerity. Truth is such by reference to the heart of man within, not to any standard without. A Tribute to Hinduism (2008)"
"To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity"
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849))
"Truth, Goodness, Beauty — those celestial thrins,Continually are born; e'en now the Universe,With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles,Its joy confesses at their recent birth. June 14, 1838"
"Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down. p. 494"
Website: Wikiquote - Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle (1863))
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